Memory Ireland: Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory

Introduction: James Joyce, Cultural Memory, and Irish Studies

1 Introduction James Joyce, Cultural Memory, and Irish Studies OON A F R AW L E Y James Joyce’s relation to “cultural memory” is inordinately complex. Joyce’s texts have come to be seen as embodying and somehow representing both memory and history, particularly in an Irish context, but also in an international one. When considered individually but especially as a collective , Joyce’s works function as narratives of the gigantic, in Susan Stewart’s phrase (Stewart 1994), that have consumed not just the particular periods in which they are set, not only whole swathes of Irish history and culture, but have come to function as digestives of world histories, languages, cultures: so that what we confront is the notion of the book-as-world. Joyce scholars are used to considering this state of affairs, and to accepting it, in some senses; it is only when we step back that we realize the extraordinary reach of Joyce’s historical sense. It is not, however, that Joyce simply deploys history in his work, or produces what contemporary publishing calls “historical fiction”— far from it. What is extraordinary is that rather than reproducing tales from Irish and myriad other histories, rather than attempting to “recreate” a past so that it becomes “accessible” to a readership like much that is classified as “historical fiction” in the contemporary marketplace, Joyce’s texts and the characters within them come to themselves reflect on and deliver analyses of history. These analyses confront particularly the fraught relationship between the individual and the historical past; the crisis of colonial history in relation to the colonized state; and the relationship between the individual’s memory of his or her own past and the past of the broader culture. Joyce, 2 Oona Frawley in other words, is an exemplary author to consider in relation to questions of how it is that history is remembered and recycled, as well as how the individual-as-actor produces, participates in, and impacts that history as it unfolds in the present. Joyce has not always been considered in this light, of course, but what is curious is that, during perhaps the last twenty years, he has increasingly been the focus of scholars interested in a particular crossover of topics: history , memory, and Irish studies. This series of texts on Irish cultural memory draws to a close, then, with a case study, in effect, of an author whose work has garnered increasing attention as forming a repository of cultural memory , and as the embodiment of responses to the manner in which cultural memory shapes the individual mind. In the 1990s many major Irish studies scholars, working in a variety of disciplines though mostly in history and literary periods, turned to Joyce to consider how the past was represented. Kevin Whelan’s seminal work on “The Dead” was critical in this regard, as has been the work of Anne Fogarty, Luke Gibbons, and John Richard. This volume, in gathering together a number of the top Joyceans in this field, aims to provide a focal point for ongoing research into how Joyce’s work represents and unpacks the past for us, and, in providing a place for this work to be considered together for the first time, hopes to provide impetus for further research in the field of Joyce and cultural memory. It is worth remarking on the particular intersection between literature and cultural memory. While the previous three volumes of Memory Ireland have provided examples of how literature has embodied cultural memory, the volumes purposefully did not focus their gaze on only this one cultural form or offer the work of literary scholars alone; in fact, the opposite impulse drove the project, which aimed to provide considerations from multidisciplinary perspectives on the means by which multiple cultural sites served to locate cultural memory. Because this volume narrows focus considerably to examine one author and his texts, the relationship between cultural memory and literature is important here. In a general sense, work on cultural memory has tended to set itself if not in strict opposition then at least in comparison to historical writing and analysis. Cultural memory has thus been classified, at different moments, as somehow less reliable than history itself, as somehow lacking in fact. These volumes have attempted to James Joyce, Cultural Memory, and Irish Studies 3 refute such notions, suggesting that cultural memory has its own validity drawing from what in...